What the Goose
As evidenced by numerous parties and at least one mouse pad, women’s bodies continue to be the currency of the realm in our industry. If you were lucky enough to be invited to several of the blow-out beer and booze orgies on Tuesday night at DAC in San Diego, you saw that engineers and executives continue to be titillated by young women with bouncing bosoms. It’s not a surprise that sex sells beer; that it sells design automation tools may continue to amaze and amuse (a few). We should probably be grateful to the executives at Magma and Denali for articulating one of life’s great truths for the women in design automation. Because if you were a woman technologist attending DAC, you wouldn’t have known until you stepped across the threshold of one of those Tuesday night parties with your male colleagues that you’re still resoundingly a second class citizen in this industry after dark. Attending one of those parties would have quickly reminded you that you’re delusional if you think you’re a fully enfranchised member of the realm, validated simply by your skill set from the neck up. Just across those thresholds, you would have been reminded instead that the only female members of the realm who wield power - especially after dusk - are those whose skill sets are firmly planted from their neck on down. Will things ever change and, more importantly, how will female technologists know? First of all, when the executives at Magma and Denali are willing to put their own daughters and sisters - rather than other people’s daughters and sisters - in tight knit shirts and teeny, tiny shorts and pay them to bounce up and down to the house beat in front of hoards of hungry, salivating men, then we’ll know that everything is above board and as it should be. Second of all, when there are comely young men in equally tight fitting briefs bouncing their equally delineated private parts under just a few square millimeters of stretchy fabric out in front of hundreds of hungry female eyes, we’ll know that the women in design automation have finally arrived as well. We’ll know women in design automation are finally welcome at the party because the objects of their perverse desires will be also gyrating away on platforms overlooking the dance floor. That certainly is what I would wish for my own daughters, should they become technologists. That they should have access to free beer and the opportunity to drool over somebody else’s objectified male child along with their professional peers. Surely the visionary executive teams at Denali and Magma would be willing to offer up their own sons to be among those comely, bouncing youth. After all, what’s good for the goose’s sons must surely be good for the gander’s daughters. As far as EVE’s mousepad is concerned. Undoubtedly, the young woman depicted there is somebody’s daughter or sister. But, oh well. Clearly, the management at EVE looked around EDA and observed that sex sells. I’m only disappointed that the executives at EVE backed off on their original image. After all, why give us almost everything, but stop short of the whole pretty bottom of the babe. The entire unadulterated buttocks would have been far more honest - and far more continental. Maybe next year. Meanwhile, rumor has it that at least one Booth Babe (a term presumably coined by male marketeers) was pretty much unzipped from the neck down to the navel during her stint on the show floor at DAC. If there are gods in the equality heaven, surely one day we’ll get a Booth Babe (of the male persuasion), discretely unzipped from the knees up to the navel. Who knows? Stranger things have happened and we can always hope. So what did the Goose say to the Gander? "Repent! Repent!" she honked. What did the Gander say to the Goose? Nothing, but he thought to himself: "What a silly goose! There’s just no dealing with her when she’s like this." Then he turned and waddled away. He was late for poker. The Goose turned and waddled back into the barnyard. The goslings followed. It was dinner time and they were hungry.
June 16, 2004 Peggy Aycinena owns and operates EDA Confidential. She can be reached at peggy@aycinena.com
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